The elevator doesn’t fall, not yet, but we don’t want it to. We cruise above it and cut our thrust, timing our fall to Bor’s. The two of us hit the platform together, shattering the last connections to this floor. There’s a jerk as steel tears, and the shaft rushes up around us, surrounding us with sparks and low-grade shrapnel.

Hail and Salt drop in after us, their weapons still hot and their augurs still bouncing noise off the wall.

We fall sixteen levels in half as many heartbeats, flaring just before the platform slams into the bottom, and clearing the shaft as the other two shells come down. The four of us pull away from the light, two into the halls opening up on either side of us, two watching the sky.

Clear? we ask.

Clear, say the others.

The other jockeys pause, but not that you’d notice. Adrenaline fuels them nearly twice as fast as human standard, and their machines polish any mistakes they might be making along the way. They’re still meat and muscle, though. Still scrolling through the map that Avery made for us to follow.

The Juno and I don’t need to check. We remember everything.

Come, we send, not looking back.

We push through the vaults that hold D’s foundries, following a feed tunnel. Armoured elevator housings rise around the main drop-shaft, brightly coloured hatches marking the places where ammunition rises from the shot-lockers deeper in. All around us are the huge conveyors from gunshops and forges, and loading zones where abandoned flatbeds wait for replacement plating and new-forged joints. Racks of Decatur spares fill cavernous warehouses, carried into the light by long-legged cranes and thick cables in the gantries above. We slow at vibrations in the floor, sweep our weapons over half-built hollows still trapped in repair jigs, broken machinery glaring at us or shrieking over the nets, but they can’t do anything to hold us up. A few cycle their weapons at us, but the knuckledraggers kept every magazine dry.

We leave every machine where we find it, following a long turn that takes us even deeper. We step wide over a decommissioned Spirit splayed across a maintenance bay, sacrificed to keep stragglers fit to fly upstairs. The future is jagged edges and odd geometry—the Spirit series is just a memory, hidden down here while the company goes about forgetting it.

Beyond those bays are others, already faded. The light runs out before we’re far past the first bulkheads, and the shipwide networks fall away soon after. Rust runs through everything, bubbling under the ancient paint and cracking under our footsteps, leaving a record of our path in dust and oxides. Abandoned silhouettes rest in corners or lie spread across the floor. Even in the low-light, we can’t tell much past the centuries of grime.